Hopes Fade for Finding More Turkish Quake Survivors

Sait Celik died in the rubble of Erzincan’s hospital on Monday, one of the many tragedies that have racked this nation since a killer earthquake struck Friday. His wife had given birth to a daughter two minutes before the temblor. She and the child were saved.

But Celik, 22, was crushed under a concrete beam and died slowly as rescue workers watched. “It was as if he personified the tragedy of Erzincan,” a national broadcaster said of Celik.

Although three people were pulled alive Monday from the wreckage in the mountain city of 150,000 people, the toll from the weekend quake continues to mount. More than 376 bodies have been recovered. But officials say they have no idea how many hundreds more lie under 2,000 buildings, damaged or destroyed in Erzincan and surrounding villages.

Search crews from Switzerland and France sought a halt in the noisy bulldozing of the city’s wreckage so their dogs could hear signs of life in the rubble. But rescue workers said there is little chance of more survivors being found after the freezing conditions of recent nights.

Still, there has been an extraordinary international response to the disaster: 180 planeloads of aid have arrived from Japan, Greece, Switzerland, Britain, France, Italy, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, U.S. military bases in Turkey and from Turkey itself. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid have been pledged. “It’s a kind of organized chaos, but things are getting there,” one French diplomat said.

Turkey is shouldering most of the efforts to care for the estimated 75,000 people left homeless by Friday’s quake, with a magnitude between 6.2 and 6.8, and a Sunday aftershock centered 45 miles south of Erzincan that registered 6.0. Hundreds of homes were damaged by Sunday’s temblor in Tunceli province, where stone, earthen and wooden houses helped hold the damage down to just two injuries.

In contrast, in Erzincan, the high toll has been chiefly blamed on poor construction of tall buildings in the city center: The buildings went up, despite a 1939 earthquake that leveled the town, killed 30,000 and led to laws ostensibly restricting buildings to three stories in the city center.

Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel has called the latest quake “an act of God.” But the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper demanded action, saying “it was not fate. It was a crime.” Turks were angered that the state owned or commissioned many of the 200 buildings that collapsed. The government has launched an inquiry, and Demirel has been forced to reply to opposition accusations that he was personally responsible for building Erzincan’s hospital.

But in Erzincan, survival--not blame--is the more pressing issue. Many residents have spent three nights outdoors in temperatures that have dipped below freezing. The supply of tents also has been a major problem. Enough tents were sent for the homeless, officials said. But many were taken by those who did not need them, either for sale on the black market or because they wanted a guarantee of some type of shelter.

Adding to the chaos has been “a vacuum of authority at the start,” said Erzincan Mayor Talip Kaban, who said many officials, during the disaster, took care of their families first, leaving the city leaderless at its moment of greatest need.

So far, 11,000 tents, 64,000 blankets and 34 tons of food have been distributed, almost all in the city and not in villages in the surrounding, snowbound mountains, where many peasants have lost livestock.

Erzincan residents continued to fight for tents and food on Monday, although Turkish troops have been posted at distribution points. But normalcy was beginning to return. Some shops opened, limited electric power returned and provincial governor Recep Yazicioglu ordered all officials to return to work.